Tom and his mother in his baby picture

After I’d taken stock of much of the damage Tom had done to our life by his cheating, I still really couldn’t understand what had been going on in his mind. How could he lie to me every single day of our life together? What had driven him to wreck his life and career by schmoozing powerful women? What was his problem?

Frankly, at this point, I felt duty bound to hate him for the rest of my life. I tried, but the awful truth was I still loved him like crazy. He was a terrific guy and worked very hard so we could have the best life he could give us. He never let us down when we got into trouble. Unfortunately, as I re-examined the events in our life, most of our troubles looked as if they were the result of his schmoozing.

However, if he’d been simply feigning love for thirty-five years, there would have been an emptiness between us or some veiled contempt for me. There had never been any of that. I had loved him because he had been lovable and returned something like love when we were together. But since his first dream confession, there was a nasty, angry Tom who kept appearing in my dreams, and who was always running away from me to other women. Who was that Tom, and why was he such a big and secret part of Tom’s life? And why was Tom so angry at me?

Tom began the process of unfolding his mental state by sending me more dreams that gave me some insights into his secret world. The dreams were like watching movies, where the story has an emotional truth hidden inside. He was letting me feel some of the agonizingly painful emotions that drove him to cheat and also to his death.

The first dream turned out to be the most revealing. In this dream, I am wandering through the lovely parklike grounds around a huge estate looking for Tom. It’s a palatial estate with many parties going on inside. But, since I don’t see Tom on this side of the grounds, in order to get to the other side, I must walk through large, muddy puddles. It is only by getting my shoes muddy that I can find him.

I find Tom. He is lying on his back, frantically smoking a cigarette; I can see and feel that he’s furiously upset, and in terrible emotional agony. He’s so hurt and enraged, it’s painful to look at him.

When he sees me, he begins savagely kicking at me like an infuriated child, yelling at me to keep away. Over and over, he screams, “Leave me alone! I can take care of myself! Go away!” He keeps dragging on the cigarette and kicking. “I can take care of myself. I don’t need you. Leave me alone.” Evidently, he can’t get up, but he can kick and smoke his cigarette to take care of himself. He is terrified that I will come nearer to him.

Only recently, a family member finally told me the tragic truth. Somewhere around the time when Tom was fourteen, shortly after his grandfather passed away, his mother was suspected of some sort of sexual misbehavior involving Tom. This was the secret reason his grandmother, then a widow, had sent him away to live with his violent, abusive father. What that behavior was, I can only guess, but referencing the dream, it looks like his mother made inappropriate advances to Tom.

After initially writing this book, and for many years, I had been so fixated on the all too familiar story of a violently abusive father, which Tom’s father certainly was, that I hadn’t thought about his mother. I’d always assumed she was just a victim of spousal abuse. I think furious Tom in my dream was actually angry and yelling at his mother.

During our marriage, Tom had told to me that his grandmother suspected her husband of ‘doing something’ with his mother. This would be after she and her sons had left her violent husband and come home to live with her parents. Researching the new information about Tom and his mother, I checked the dates on the family records I have. Tom’s mother left her husband when Tom was about ten. Tom’s grandfather passed away a few months before Tom turned fifteen.

I remember in the first reading by Pam, when I knew nothing of Tom’s infidelity, he kept saying ‘face it, don’t hide anything.’ I thought I’d faced the worst when I realized he’d been unfaithful. It has taken me much longer to face the reality of some degree of incest. While no one still living can say for sure, the emotional depth and self-destructiveness of Tom’s mental problems lead me to believe that his mother may have been sexually inappropriate with Tom in some fashion from a young age. It seems sexual behavior with a minor is so violating, that it creates permanent psychological damage that lasts into adulthood.

It’s awful even to imagine. And how much worse for Tom to carry such a shameful and infuriating memory seared into his psyche for the rest of his life.

Sexual abuse is a terrible, secret family tragedy that appears to be a fatal legacy for those involved. I believe that Tom’s mother may have been abused as a child, leading to her lifelong sexual and alcohol problems, then ultimately to her own very early death. Was his mother passing on the abuse she’d endured as a child? By the end of her life, she had sunk very far into depravity. She died an alcoholic before she was forty years old.

What a destructive and shocking secret! Tom had all the classic symptoms of childhood sexual abuse. He had two distinct and opposing personalities, an exaggerated terror of being vulnerable, secret anger at me for loving him, and deep depressions where he was at the bottom of a cold, dark well for days on end, completely unable to feel anything.